Hello everyone
A lot of times I have been reading through posts here claiming that during the course of the play the person who is playing faces a problem - before he even manages to finish building a ship it is already outdated. With the introduction of NPC countdown I myself think of running a second campaign simulating the current state of affairs. However how to do this? If I gave the states the capacity they have now the research would be extremely fast (quite a lot of labs at start and even if not, very easy to build) and would lead to severe "obsoleteness" of the ships that are yet to be even finished.
For this I ask for a simple tool - Steve, would it be possible to introduce something that we saw in many other space 4x games, so called research setting? Think of Civilization or Space Empires or maybe Galactic Civilizations II. In all of these you can decide how fast (costly) the research will be. For Aurora I imagine a simple box (like many others already) that would say: Research cost: 10. If you increase this number to say 50 the research would be 5x slower (the technology costs would go up by a number of 5), if to 100, then it would be ten times slower. If you decreased it to 1, they would be 10 times cheaper (no idea why anyone would do it but say that you may need it). Or just make it 1 as basic with the possibility to increase the costs and thus slow down the technological progress in the game.
I for one would really love this. It would give us the possibility to play with bigger empires while creating fleets that are not obsolete but top of the line and not having to refit them every five months when the empire is not capable of supporting so many ships.
I have no idea if it's easy to implement or not but please consider this. No idea how many users would use this but I certainly would and I think that it could give us a tool to further shape the campaigns to our liking.
Would this be possible? Please?